Euro crisis threat to UK economy

Britain's Chancellor, Finance secretary, George Osborne will beat his deficit reduction target by 3 billion pounds in the current financial year but prospects for 2012 remain bleak, a respected economic thinktank warned Wednesday. The Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) annual Green Budget said the Government's spending cuts will see it undershoot the 127 billion pounds target set by independent spending watchdog the Office for Budget Responsibility for the year to April. However, if the eurozone debt crisis was allowed to spiral out of control it could plunge the UK back into a "deep recession" with GDP falling both this year and the next, it warned, causing national debt to soar. But it said the UK's economy is set to grow by just 0.3% over 2012, significantly lower than the 0.7% predicted by the OBR. It said there is a growing case for a significant short-term fiscal stimulus to boost the economy. But despite the daunting scale of the cuts, the pressures of an ageing population meant there was "little scope for significant permanent loosening." The report said the size of austerity measures planned for the UK were "almost without historical or international precedent" and represent the biggest sustained cuts since the Second World War. It pointed out that, by the end of the current financial year, just 6% of the cuts will have been implemented, and added: "How deliverable the remainder will prove to be remains to be seen." But the pressures of an ageing population on health and pensions budgets mean that "further hard choices over tax and spending are likely to be needed".